Tag: danionella

You’re looking at the face of a new species of fish and judging by the two fearsome fangs, you’ll probably understand how it got its scientific name – Danionella dracula. The teeth do look terrifying but fortunately, their owner is a tiny animal just 15 millimetres long. Ralf Britz from London’s Natural History Museum discovered the fanged fish in a small stream in northern Burma, just two years ago. The more he studied them, the more he realised that they are physically extraordinary in many ways.

For a start, those are no ordinary teeth – they are actually just part of the fish’s jawbone. True teeth are separate from the jaws that house them and are made of several tissues including enamel and dentine. Those of D.dracula are protrusions of the jaw itself and are made of solid bone. The fish has rows of them in both its upper and lower jaw that look very convincingly like actual teeth. Even though it comes from a long line of fish that have lost their teeth, D.dracula has managed to re-evolve them through a completely unique route.

Secondly, D.dracula seems to be missing several bones, with 44 fewer than close relatives like the zebrafish, Danio rario. They haven’t disappeared – they never formed in the first place. Compared to other related fish, D.dracula stops developing at a much earlier point and retains the abridged skeleton of a larva throughout its adult life. It’s the Peter Pan of the carp family.